12 January 2013

Obamacare's Other Shoe

By Mark Steyn

If
you had buttonholed me in the Senate men’s room circa 2003 and told me
that a decade hence Joe Biden would be America’s vice president, John
Kerry secretary of state, and Chuck Hagel secretary of defense, I’d have
laughed and waited for the punch line: The Leahy administration?
President Lautenberg? Celebrate lack of diversity! But even in the
republic’s descent into a Blowhardocracy staffed by a Zombie House of
Lords, there are distinctions to be drawn. Senator Kerry having been
reliably wrong on every foreign-policy issue of the last 40 years, it
would seem likely that at this stage in his life he will be content
merely to be in office, jetting hither and yon boring the pants off
whichever presidents and prime ministers are foolish enough to grant him
an audience. Beyond the photo-ops, the world will drift on toward the
post-American era: Beijing will carry on gobbling up resources around
the planet, Czar Putin will flex his moobs across Eastern Europe and
Central Asia, the Arab Spring “democracies” will see impressive growth
in the critical clitoridectomy sector of the economy, Iran will go
nuclear, and John Kerry will go to black-tie banquets in Europe. But
Chuck Hagel is a different kettle of senatorial huffenpuffer. And not
because of what appears to be a certain antipathy toward Jews and gays.
That would be awkward at the Tony Awards, but at the Arab League the
post-summit locker-room schmoozing should be a breeze. Since his
celebrated “evolution” on marriage last year, President Obama is
famously partial to one of those constituencies, so presumably he didn’t
nominate an obscure forgotten senator because of his fascinating
insights into the appropriate level of “obviousness” the differently
oriented should adopt. So why Hagel? Why now?

My comrade Jonah Goldberg says this nomination is a “petty pick” made
by Obama “out of spite.” I’m not so sure. If the signature
accomplishment of the president’s first term was Obamacare (I’m using
“signature accomplishment” in the Washington sense of “ruinously
expensive bureaucratic sinkhole”), what would he be looking to pull off
in his second (aside from the repeal of the 22nd Amendment)? Hagel isn’t
being nominated to the Department of Zionist and Homosexual Regulatory
Oversight but to the Department of Defense. Which he calls “bloated.”

“The Pentagon,” he said a year ago, “needs to be pared down.” Unlike
the current secretary, Leon Panetta, who’s strongly opposed to the
mandated “sequestration” cuts to the defense budget, Hagel thinks
they’re merely a good start.

That’s why Obama’s offered him the gig. Because Obamacare at home
leads inevitably to Obamacuts abroad. In that sense, America will be
doing no more than following the same glum trajectory of every other
great power in the postwar era. I feel only a wee bit sheepish about
quoting my book After America two weeks running, since it’s
hardly my fault Obama’s using it as the operating manual for his second
term (I may sue for breach of copyright and retire to Tahiti). At any
rate, somewhere around Chapter Five, I suggest that, having succeeded
Britain as the dominant power, America may follow the old country in
decline, too:

“In what other ways might the mighty eagle emulate the tattered old
lion? First comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After
empire, Britain turned inward: Between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of
government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to seven, while
the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And
that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

“Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have
Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s
easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it
can’t afford — cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless
military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite?”

Democrats put it slightly differently: In 2004 John Kerry demanded to
know why we were building firehouses in Iraq but closing them in
America (the municipal fire department apparently falling, like
everything else, under the federal government). Barack Obama prefers to
say that it’s time for the United States to do some nation-building at
home — the pilot program in Afghanistan having worked out so well.
Either line will do, and, like Britain’s inverted budget priorities,
both implicitly acknowledge that a military-industrial complex and a
dependency-bureaucrat complex are incompatible. And that’s before you
factor in Washington-size borrowing, under which, within this decade,
the interest payments on the debt will be covering the entire cost of
the Chinese military. America can fund the Pentagon or the People’s
Liberation Army, but not both, not for long. Having gotten the citizenry
to accept a supersized welfare bureaucracy, Obama reasonably enough
figures he can just as easily get them used to a shrunken
American presence in the wider world.

So the president is looking for his equivalent of Denis Healey, the
Labour cabinet minister who in the 1968 defense review announced an all
but total withdrawal of British forces from “east of Suez” — a phrase
that in the imperial imagination is less geographic than psychological.

Kipling’s English Tommy on the road to Mandalay: “Ship me somewheres
east of Suez . . . ” And then a cheeseparing defense minister says: No,
we won’t. Not now, not ever again. It’s over.

Who would you hire for the Pentagon’s east-of-Suez moment? According to the Washington Post, Obama picked Hagel to “bridge the partisan divide. "

Even for the court eunuchs of the palace media, that must be hard to
type with a straight face: He seems to be all but entirely loathed by
his own party. Nevertheless, he is technically a Republican, not to
mention a bona fide war hero. Only Nixon can go to China, and only a
pro-life, pro-gun, climate-denialist, homophobic, Strom Thurmond–loving,
medal-draped Republican can go to the Pentagon and tell them to start
clearing out their desks. Obama has picked a guy whose rhetoric is more
anti-Pentagon than his own, and who, unlike most of the cabinet
senators, has a record of executive experience that suggests he may well
live up to it.

If he pulls it off, it’ll be a big part of Obama’s legacy. And, if he
doesn’t, I’m sure the media will be happy to remind everyone that, oh
well, Hagel was a Republican.

But beyond the politics is a real question. He’s not wrong to raise
the question of Pentagon “bloat.” The United States has the most
lavishly funded military on the planet, and what does it buy you? In the
Hindu Kush, we’re taking twelve years to lose to goatherds with
fertilizer.

Something is wrong with this picture. Indeed, something is badly
wrong with the American way of war. And no one could seriously argue
that, in the latest in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of
America’s un-won wars, the problem is a lack of money or resources.
Given its track record, why shouldn’t the Pentagon get a top-to-toe
overhaul — or at least a cost-benefit analysis?

Just to be clear: I disagree with Hagel on Israel, on Iran, and on
most everything else. But my colleagues on the right are in denial if
they don’t think there are some very basic questions that need to be
asked about the too-big-to-fail Department of Defense. Obama would like
the U.S. military to do less. Some of us would like it to do more with
less — more nimbly, more artfully. But, if the national-security
establishment won’t acknowledge there’s even a problem, they’re unlikely
to like the solutions imposed by others. “Petty” and “spiteful”? No.
Obamacare’s other shoe.